Conservatives who attack President Obama over the "reset" are echoing Georgian propaganda and not addressing the real problem

Production still from Five Days of War, a film about the 2008 South Ossetia War / Georgia International Films

Heritage scholar James Jay Carafano endorses the Georgia propaganda film "5 Days of War."

The film ends with testimonies from Georgians who lost
family members in the war. "After I met a lot of refugees," Harlin said
last night during a post-screening discussion of the movie at
Washington's Landmark Theater, "I felt I had to tell their story. That's
why we added the testimonials."

The liberal blogosphere is already attacking Harlin's film for being
"anti-Russian." Though mainstream Hollywood embraced "Hotel Rwanda," a
similar motion picture, it will likely turn its back on "5 Days of War."
The difference: the latter implicitly calls into question Mr. Obama's
decision to make nice with Moscow.

So, let's ignore the questionable moral equivalence of a five-day war
that killed far fewer than a thousand people to a genocide that killed
more than a million people during four horrifying months of systemic murder.
We can probably safely assume Renny Harlin did not interview any
Ossetians or Abkhazians for his film's recounting of horrors -- nor did he
consult the sections of the Human Rights Watch report which also accused
the Georgians of committing war crimes and illegally shelling
Tshkinvali before the start of the war (an action which killed several
Russian troops and which was the casus belli for a Russian response).

In other words, Carafano is starting his review from a pretty
fundamentally dishonest perspective (he could have mentioned that Renny
Harlin's film was actually sponsored by the government of Georgia, but that might get in the way of his narrative).

But it doesn't stop at the film. Carafano brings up the bombings in Georgia:

For example, recent allegations that the Russians
engineered last year's bombing outside the U.S. Embassy in Georgia (at
the same time the White House was pushing for ratification of a
U.S.-Russia arms control treaty) quickly produced a squad of predictable
skeptics. Writing for The Atlantic, Joshua Foust (a fellow at the
American Security Project) suggested the whole thing may have been a
frame-job by the Georgians. "[T]hey have a vested interest in blaming
everything on Russia," he points out.

Here, however, is what Foust doesn't explain. It looks like the
Georgians had been trying to keep the whole story quiet -- and work back
channels in the U.S. to get the Russians to back off. The story was
actually "outed" here in the U.S.

Yes, to a point. However, since Carafano is apparently aware of my
analysis of reporting on the Georgian bombings (and not, let us assume,
just filching links from another dishonest Weekly Standard freakout about it), then he might have thought to reference the additional reporting
I highlighted that casts doubt on the CIA's assignment of blame to the
GRU. Or that, contrary to his portrayal, Georgia has been pushing this bombing story
since December. In fact, since we're going there, here is the letter
the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been emailing reporters and
embassies since June:

So to claim the Georgian government wanted to keep this quiet is,
once again, just dishonest. And the film meant to portray Russians as
grizzled evil-doers and Georgians as helpless lambs is the worst sort of
pedantic malarkey.

Then again, this is not much of a surprise. Much as the Right wants
to complain that inexplicable Russian hostility is some artifact of
President Obama's uniquely complacent Russia policy, the relationship
actually began suffering strain under President Bush -- well before
the 2008 war in Georgia. Despite that, the U.S. -- Russian relationship
remains much as it always has: periods of guarded cooperated punctuated
by periods of tension.

Now, I have my own problems
with Obama's policy of "reset" with Russia. I think the president was
too quick to dismiss President Bush's very real accomplishments in
securing Russian cooperation on a number of issues, and too reliant on
the last year of his term to define what the relationship had become.

That being said, this is sadly part of a pattern. Every single
election cycle since the end of the Cold War, the Right has spun up this
huge push to portray Democrats as being "soft" on Russia. In the 1990s,
the rightwing meme was that President Clinton was too weak on fighting
Boris Yeltsin's corruption. Despite strongly condemning Russia's mass killings during the second Chechen War, he was nevertheless accused of "waffling" by critics. In 2004, John Kerry was derided as being weak on terrorism after the Beslan School massacre.
And finally, from 2008 onward, President Obama has been derided for his
weakness on Russia, starting with the war in Georgia and continuing to
the current push back against his "reset" policy.

There's no doubt the Left is much less confrontational toward Russia.
There's very little doubt that sometimes a little confrontation is good
for a relationship defined as much by frustration as it is by
accommodation. But the Right's gleeful use of misleading rhetoric to gin
up an adversary where one really doesn't exist is worse than
embarrassing: it is actively counterproductive to ever having a normal
relationship with Russia. It's time to stop.

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